After months of turmoil, the chair and the terms of reference of the government’s national grooming gangs inquiry have at last been announced. The inquiry will be led by Baroness Anne Longfield, a Labour peer and former children’s commissioner. She will investigate the ‘systemic, institutional and individual’ failures to deal with these gangs and to
Should the police disclose the ethnicity and background of suspects in high-profile crimes, and how soon should they reveal this information? In the year since the Southport unrest – in which migrant hotels were attacked after online claims the attacker had been an asylum seeker – the British state has had to ask itself this question. While
It was only a matter of time before the Guardian went for Professor Matthew Goodwin. The honorary president of Reform’s new student wing came under attack this week after he said a UK-born man of African heritage – who is alleged to have stabbed ten people on a train near Huntingdon earlier this month – was not truly
Michael Heseltine is making a bid to become the fresh new face of Remoanerism. Earlier this month ‘Hezza’ wowed the wets at Tory conference with a speech to the effect that Reform are ‘equivalents to the fascists in the 30s’ for the crime of wanting to reduce immigration. This week, having acquired a taste for
The wall-to-wall chorus of condemnation of Sarah Pochin’s remarks last week about woke advertising has been hysterical even by the left’s standards. ‘Sarah Pochin’s comments were a disgrace’, fulminated Labour’s X account, ‘and Nigel Farage’s silence is deafening.’ David Lammy said the remarks were ‘mean, nasty and racist’ and wants her sacked. Health Secretary Wes
The decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending their Europa League game against Aston Villa next month has led to a major row about two-tier policing. Why exactly is the arrival of several thousand Israelis in Birmingham expected to precipitate a major, violent riot? And shouldn’t West Midlands Police, rather than advising the
‘Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground’, Oxford student Samuel Williams appeared to chant at a central London pro-Palestine demonstration last Saturday, footage of which has since gone viral on social media. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, a 20-year-old man presumed to be Williams (although this remains unconfirmed by the
The conviction of Hamit Coskun of a public order offence for burning a Quran has today been overturned by Southwark Crown Court. It’s a vital victory for free speech in the UK, as well as for Mr Coskun, and the National Secular Society and the Free Speech Union, which defended him. It’s a mark of
When Nigel Farage appeared to ape Donald Trump by noting the problem of migrants mistreating British wildlife, his comments were swiftly condemned. Speaking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari on Wednesday, the Reform leader suggested that ‘swans were being eaten in Royal Parks in this country’ and that ‘carp were being taken out of ponds’. Who was
GB News has had a good summer. Buoyed by a summer of small boat crossings and immigration protests and arrests for free speech, the People’s Channel has been nosing ahead of rivals BBC, ITV and Sky News. In August, its average views between 6 a.m. and 2 a.m. rose to 85,000, with the BBC News
The outrageous arrest of Graham Linehan this week seems almost designed to cause maximum embarrassment to the British government. Just a day after the news broke, Nigel Farage was already raising the case at a free-speech Congressional committee in Washington, DC, where the Reform leader happily played prime-minister-in-waiting as he opined gravely about our values
It’s a mark of the absurd legalism of Britain’s political system that after a month of fierce protests and years of government intransigence over asylum hotels, the future of the asylum system now rests on the whims of several judges in a dispute about planning permission. The Home Office and the owners of the Bell
On Wednesday at Liverpool Crown Court, Mohammed Fahir Amaaz, one of the two brothers accused of the Manchester Airport attack last July, was found guilty of assaulting two female police officers, as well as a member of the public. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on a charge that Amaaz and his brother,
Migrant hotel protests are erupting across the country, as ‘tinderbox’ Britain catches fire. What began with a series of protests in Epping, Essex, over the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by a recently arrived Ethiopian migrant, has now spread, as Brits air long-standing grievances about asylum seekers they have been forced to host
When it comes to protests against immigration and asylum hotels, accusations of two-tier policing are never far away. This week the spotlight has fallen on Essex Police, and its handling of a demonstration last week by Epping residents against an asylum hotel in the town, following an alleged sexual assault by a recently arrived Ethiopian
‘We are facing a long, hot summer’, warned a report on social cohesion on Tuesday, ‘with a powder keg of tensions left largely unaddressed from last year that could easily ignite once again’. It only took two days for the first sign of this grim prediction coming true. This time, though, the expression of public
It is with some measure of irritation, I must confess, that I am drawn away from this balmy weekend to discuss the idiotic antics of a so-called musical act by the name of ‘Bob Vylan’. At Glastonbury on Saturday, the frontman of the English ‘punk duo’ led the crowd in a chant. First it was just ‘Free, free Palestine’; but then it became ‘Death, death to the IDF’. They also
It’s an ominous time for a state-of-the-nation conference. Each week, the shores we defended against Hitler, Napoleon and the Spanish Armada are breached by hundreds of foreign men, while asylum seekers make up ‘a significant proportion’ of those currently being investigated for the grooming of British children. Earlier this month, there were days of violent anti-immigration riots
Was the prosecution of Lucy Connolly in the public interest? That is the question now being asked of the embattled Attorney General, Richard Hermer, following my story in the Sunday Telegraph that Hermer approved the charge of stirring up racial hatred against the mother and childminder last summer, over a hastily deleted tweet on the night
In 2021, after the barbaric Islamist murder of Sir David Amess MP, the response of Britain’s political class was as baffling as it was shameful: it decided to ramp up censorship of the internet. Somehow, MPs’ vital personal safety came to be equated with the nebulous concept of ‘safety’ online, along with the protection of
